﻿A Peach of a Story 
By T-bone Slim in Industrial Solidarity  

It seems the peach crop must be destroyed so as to keep the prices from spoiling in cans––couldn’t they give them to the paupers in the country poor farms to go with that yearly egg? 
Of course not––what am I thinking about––the s y s t e m would go kerplunk.  
Recently I was accused of being “smarty”––that’s all right but pay no attention to them people –– I’m capable of being worse: when I left for the harvest this year I though I was the whole cheese and half the macaroni but I soon found out there are other people in this organization––I ain’t so much just now. Mistakes like that will happen to the most careful mathematicians. 
Last night a perfectly respectable citizen was overwhelmed by a series of errors and disgraced himself intellectually something scandalous . . . 
I was in his garden carrying on some scientific demonstrations –– not experiments––removing potatoes from the vines and replanting the vines; my theory being that if the operation is done on a moonless night nature will replace the spuds I carry away.  
I had considerable trouble convincing him on that score––indeed it was his opinion I was trying to put him in a poor house. What would I want to put him in the poor house for, an entire stranger to me––he reasons like a fish! 
Many poor fish reason that way. A farmer reasons the I. W. W. is trying to put him in a poor house––a case of mistaken identity.  
When the I. W. W. asks the farmer to pay $4 for 10 hours’ work it is offering John a bargain––actually making John a handsome present. When the I. W. W. asks John to pay as much as other employers pay, 5 or 6 or 7 dollars, it is still wishing on John a great benefit and profit––for everybody knows when John hires an I. W. W. he is getting an able-bodied worker, the pick of the class and when he hires a non-union man he gets “scrub” materials––he himself must know that all good workers are first to organize and that all his capable men have been union men as well as that all his inefficient men have been non-union, non-sensible and non-moral. 
No, indeed, the I. W. W. is not trying to put John in the poor house––but John himself is trying to break into it––and the I. W. W. is trying to keep him out.  
The farmer is trying to put the I. W. W. into a poor house––such pulling and hauling I never saw in my life: 
John gets out on the corner and proclaims a wage scale that can be accepted only by “kids” (not yet dry behind the ears) and expects full grown, he-men to jump into his Rolls-Royce and break it down–– yes sir, there he is on the corner waving three dollars in the air and offering to bet it against a day’s work––5 a. m. to 9:30 p. m. a matter of 9½ hours belt time––who ever heard of a $3 man that could stay out in the field 15½ hours and work besides, belt-time or blower-time, anytime? But the $3, low pay, has a tendency of keeping that worker always frail, always inefficient and always busted and, if the union man, the strong man, accepts similar wages soon he too will be frail, inefficient and bankrupt and twenty-four hours won’t be long enough for a day’s work. 
If the “kid” is trained to low wages he will grow up a low grade working man and that is the direction in which lies the poor house––the other house is the bug house.